Stateside With Rosalea : Quid

Tucked away behind a park on
the edge of San Francisco’s Financial District is a
low-rise brick building that is home to the offices of Quid.
If you haven’t heard of Quid before, 2013 might be the
year to change all that when it rolls out the web version of
its augmented intelligence software, hoping to challenge
Google and Bing as a search platform, especially for topics
that are in the news.

“Google says: Here’s the best
story; here’s the list,” explains Sean
Gourley, co-founder of Quid. What Quid’s software will
allow a user to say, he continues, is “Instead of giving
me the best story, give me every story. And instead of
giving it to me as a list, give it to me as a
map.”

“That is the metaphorical change here in the
consumption of information. We’re not trying to guess the
best story for you; we’re trying to give you a platform
for you to understand the entirety of the
landscape.”

Since its creation in 2009, Quid has
been doing just that for enterprise users. Among the clients
listed on its corporate website are Samsung, Intel,
Microsoft, and Russia’s largest bank, Sderbank. While
Gourley is understandably coy about what exactly these and
other clients use Quid for, he says the software is usually
deployed by strategy groups within a company. Dissatisfied
with how anecdotal, political, and ad hoc most strategy
approaches are, they’re seeking an alternative.

That
alternative is augmented intelligence. If you’re not
familiar with the term, you should watch Gourley’s TEDx
Auckland presentation about it here.
Basically, Quid’s software uses a computer to read
thousands of documents, classify them according to their
content and their relationship to other documents, and then
return them to you as a “map of conversations”. (Or a
map of intellectual properties, or a map of technologies,
depending on what a company’s strategy group is focused
on.)

You then use your human intelligence to navigate that
map.

Let’s say you wanted to know about all the stories
around cyber security. Other companies make data mining
programs that bring back lists of all the relevant articles;
lists that might be imported into an Excel file and then
reordered according to the user’s needs. Quid generates
that data file, but it also creates a visualization of it.
You can adjust the settings so that you see, for example,
which topics got the most attention, or you can trace a
particular article back to the sources the reporter used and
see who else was using those sources.

As Gourley shows me how
Quid works, it is obvious that he thrives on complexity. He
delights in manipulating the many parameters that can be set
so that the data map draws the human eye in a way that lists
cannot, even when the lists are sorted on some particular
field.

“What we have here,” he explains about one
map, “is a projection of different timelines across
different source ranks, to see where ideas have moved
through time in between different qualities of sources.
These are the top sources; these are more of the blogs. You
can see where the ideas resonate from.

“You can take a
three-dimensional view of the news landscape through time.
You can see where stories are resonating between sources
through time. The human brain doesn't do this. That's the
point. It's an incredibly complex world that we're trying to
navigate, and we don't have the cognitive wherewithal to do
it.”

But neither does a computer have the wherewithal to
make the kind of reasoned choice the human mind is capable
of. “There's no button to push to tell you: This is the
story that I need to put out there to change the
conversation around cyber security. We don't have algorithms
to tell us that. But we do have tools that help us make
better decisions around it.”

The combination of data
mining and data visualization might seem rather removed from
daily life, but it is a multi-billion dollar industry that
affects what gets traction in the media, which small
companies are snapped up by larger ones wanting to get ahead
of the technology curve, and—I’m guessing—who gets
poached from which company as the result of looking at a map
of patent authors and the groups they are part of.

Gourley’s team, working out of
converted warehouse space, is at the cutting edge of this
“really cool way of interacting with information”. There
are 42 people on staff, including four dedicated to sales.
Quid’s growth since 2009 has been a combination of growth
funded by venture capital and growth that is funded by
dollars from the deals it makes with big clients.

When I
ask if there’s a “lite” version of Quid for people
like me, Gourley replies, “We have a Kiwi programmer
working on just that solution. Joey is an Auckland
University grad. He's working on the web version. We're
pretty excited for a release of that this year, where
instead of going to Google, you'll be able to go to Quid and
you'll have all this information. That'll change things up
pretty dramatically. This is going to be a big year for
us.”

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